Wiki with Markdown

28 May 2005

After I stumbled upon the cool Markdown syntax and the Markdown text parser, some time ago. I have been looking for a wiki system which uses this cool syntax. We use a wiki system at work to document customer setups in, and a wiki with a decent syntax would be nice. A guy has made PHP Markdown an port of Markdown to PHP and I hoped it would be easy to find a wiki system using markdown syntax. So far I only found Instiki who lives up to this demand fully, which works verywell under Ubuntu. Other wikis - like DokuWiki - are able to use markdown as a rendering plugin but it never feels fully integraded. With DokuWiki you need to wrap you text in tags like this:

text with markdown syntax here

… and why would I want to do that on every page I create? Another thing that turned me away from DokuWiki was the fact that I wasn’t able to make it work :-D

Thought I find Instiki really cool it has it’s drawbacks too:

The first I noticed was that it is written in ruby. Not that that Ruby is a bad thing but I would have prefeered a wiki system in PHP so I would understand the code myself. This I can live with.

The fact that it is written in Ruby, makes unable to run it on port 80 where my Apache server is running. Perhapes I would be able to solve this using some sort of proxy thing with Apache. Requsts on a certain domains/page gets forwarded to another port (for Instiki that would be 2500)… I think this is also the way Zope usually works. If this would endeed work I could live with that. I havn’t searched for this “problem” on their website though…

I’m not able to upload files not even images and that is a thing I cannot live without.

When image (file) upload enters Instiki it will contain all I need for a great wiki. I trust they will implement it in a good way… all the other things they made is. It would be cool if I could use the syntax in my weblog… but that is only a matter of doing a little footwork.